My Chinese language learning log
Posted: Sun Jul 09, 2017 1:51 pm
Hello everybody,
This is my first language log, I'm currently learning Mandarin Chinese and I want a log so that I'll be able to look back and see my progress, and also as I'll be trying a few experiments I thought people might be interested in that.
I decided to learn Chinese seriously about a month ago. I already have learned Spanish to a relatively high level, and have dabbled a bit in French and Portuguese, so I have a good idea of how to learn a language. My goal is to make this as efficient as possible and learn as quickly as possible. For me, then whole point of learning another language is to learn about another culture, to be able to speak with people from other countries and to be able to consume media that generally isn't available in English, e.g. books, movies, series, etc.
So for that reason, I want to efficiently learn enough to become conversational and to be able to read and use the language as quickly as possible. Of course, I know this is a long-term project that will most likely take many years, but I will see how I can hack the language.
Anyway, on to my method. As I have read that pronunciation is one of the most important parts of Chinese, I've bought myself a pronunciation trainer from Gabriel Wyner's website, fluent forever. It has been a great help and I've been using it fairly consistently for the past few weeks, so hopefully my pronunciation will continue to improve. I guess the real test will be when I start to speak to natives.
One thing about the language that fascinates me are the characters, it's so different to any of the European languages that I really want to master them. So after extensive research, I've decided to use the method outlined in Remembering Simplified Hanzi by James Heisig, as it seems to be incredibly efficient and I agree with his approach. As I am on holidays for the next two months (one of the perks of being an English teacher), I can dedicate a lot of time to this, therefore I've set myself a challenge. My goal is to complete both of his books, learning 3,000 characters by the end of the summer.
This is a tall order, and involves learning 50 characters a day, but as the course is very well structured and the focus is on learning to write and recognise the characters, and not on pronouncing them, it shouldn't be that hard. I'm using the app Skritter to keep track of them for me, using its SRS system, and I'm currently on day 6 of the challenge. So my posts for the next few weeks will mainly be about my progress with that. I've currently learned 230 characters with a 78% retention rate, so hopefully I can improve on that.
Anyway, I hope you find this to be an interesting read, any tips and encouragement are welcomed! I've got to go study now, see you in the next post.
[edit: error correction}
This is my first language log, I'm currently learning Mandarin Chinese and I want a log so that I'll be able to look back and see my progress, and also as I'll be trying a few experiments I thought people might be interested in that.
I decided to learn Chinese seriously about a month ago. I already have learned Spanish to a relatively high level, and have dabbled a bit in French and Portuguese, so I have a good idea of how to learn a language. My goal is to make this as efficient as possible and learn as quickly as possible. For me, then whole point of learning another language is to learn about another culture, to be able to speak with people from other countries and to be able to consume media that generally isn't available in English, e.g. books, movies, series, etc.
So for that reason, I want to efficiently learn enough to become conversational and to be able to read and use the language as quickly as possible. Of course, I know this is a long-term project that will most likely take many years, but I will see how I can hack the language.
Anyway, on to my method. As I have read that pronunciation is one of the most important parts of Chinese, I've bought myself a pronunciation trainer from Gabriel Wyner's website, fluent forever. It has been a great help and I've been using it fairly consistently for the past few weeks, so hopefully my pronunciation will continue to improve. I guess the real test will be when I start to speak to natives.
One thing about the language that fascinates me are the characters, it's so different to any of the European languages that I really want to master them. So after extensive research, I've decided to use the method outlined in Remembering Simplified Hanzi by James Heisig, as it seems to be incredibly efficient and I agree with his approach. As I am on holidays for the next two months (one of the perks of being an English teacher), I can dedicate a lot of time to this, therefore I've set myself a challenge. My goal is to complete both of his books, learning 3,000 characters by the end of the summer.
This is a tall order, and involves learning 50 characters a day, but as the course is very well structured and the focus is on learning to write and recognise the characters, and not on pronouncing them, it shouldn't be that hard. I'm using the app Skritter to keep track of them for me, using its SRS system, and I'm currently on day 6 of the challenge. So my posts for the next few weeks will mainly be about my progress with that. I've currently learned 230 characters with a 78% retention rate, so hopefully I can improve on that.
Anyway, I hope you find this to be an interesting read, any tips and encouragement are welcomed! I've got to go study now, see you in the next post.
[edit: error correction}